『Ralph Nader Radio Hour』のカバーアート

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

著者： Ralph Nader
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概要

 Ralph Nader talks about what’s happening in America, what’s happening around the world, and most importantly what’s happening underneath it all.

www.ralphnaderradiohour.comRalph Nader 政治・政府 政治学
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  • Targeting Civilians

    Targeting Civilians
    2026/03/28
    Ralph welcomes Wes Bryant, a retired Air Force special operations master sergeant and former analyst at the Civilian Protection Center who talks to us about how civilians, either through incompetence or negligence, are not being protected during American missile strikes. Then our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, joins us to break down his latest op-ed “The Power to Declare War Belongs to Congress Alone.”Wes Bryant is a defense and national security analyst with focus on foreign policy and global conflict, counterterrorism and extremism, strike and joint targeting operations, and civilian harm. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 at the rank of Master Sergeant after twenty years of active duty service. He was formerly a senior policy analyst and advisor on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where he led as the first-ever Branch Chief of Civilian Harm Assessments.This strike [on the girls’ school in Minab, Iran] violated standing practices and doctrine we’ve had in place for two, three decades. That’s aside from even the work we were doing at the Pentagon in civilian harm mitigation to get better at this sort of thing and prevent these things from happening…This is just one of many. My colleagues at Airwars who track civilian harm incidents in conflict zones—right now, they’re tracking over 130 separate incidents throughout Iran (that’s between the U.S. and Israel) and that number is going to spike. And of course we’re tracking, I believe, it’s over 2,000 civilian casualties. That number is surely going to spike once the smoke clears.Wes BryantI believe that right now, with the way we are conducting ourselves as a nation on the international stage—and most importantly, the way we’re using or abusing our military and the use of lethal military force—we are carrying out state terrorism. Israel assuredly has been for years.Wes BryantWe hear all these people (especially Hegseth most recently) talking about “precision” —”precision strikes” and “no one’s more precise” and “precision warfare”. Well, I was an expert in precision warfare. I was one of the people helping develop our standards for precision warfare and try to make us get to the point where we’re actually carrying out precision warfare consistently. Precision warfare really means the minimal use of resources, the minimal use of (as Hegseth says) lethality in order to accomplish strategic objectives—and the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure. We have in Gaza simply the use of precision weapons to decimate an entire urban infrastructure and decimate parts of the population. So what I say is (and not flippantly, unfortunately, I say it somberly) the only thing being applied here in terms of precision is that civilians and civilian infrastructure are being killed and destroyed more precisely.Wes BryantBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.When we decided in the culture that we would rather be an empire that got an adrenaline high from being a colossus and surrendering our republican virtues of rule of law, everyone gets to march to their own drummer, find fulfillment as long as they’re not harming anyone else, you then find this repeated disrespect for the Declare War Clause.Bruce FeinNews 3/27/26* Our top stories this week have to do with the tiny, blockaded island nation of Cuba. Cuba, famous for its medical innovations including a lung cancer vaccine, has long maintained medical missions abroad. In recent days, the United States has pressured foreign governments to end these partnerships, including passing a law that opens up the possibility of sanctions on countries that accept these medical missions. This week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Mexico will retain the Cuban doctors in defiance of American threats. Since 2022, thousands of Cuban medical workers have been deployed in poor, rural areas of the country. Sheinbaum emphasized that “It’s hard to get Mexican doctors and specialists to go out to many rural areas where we need medical specialists, and the Cubans are willing to work there,” per Al Jazeera. However, Mexico is the exception. Within the past month, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Guyana and the Bahamas have all announced that the Cuban doctors will leave their countries under American pressure. It is tragic to think of the number of poor people in the rural areas of these countries who will needlessly suffer and die simply because they are caught in the crossfire of American imperialism.* In more Cuba news, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told Drop Site that the Cuban government is ...
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    2 時間 4 分
  • The U.S.-Israel Axis

    The U.S.-Israel Axis
    2026/03/21
    Ralph welcomes international human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber to discuss the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran. Then, Ralph speaks to investigative reporter David Cay Johnston about the finances of Donald Trump.Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and activist, and a former senior United Nations human rights official. A human rights activist in the 1980s, he would go on to serve for more than three decades at the United Nations, with postings in Switzerland, Palestine, Afghanistan, and UN Headquarters in New York. In October of 2023, he left the United Nations, penning a widely read letter criticizing the UN’s human rights failures in the Middle East, warning of unfolding genocide in Gaza, and calling for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on international law, human rights, and equality.Anyone who pays attention knows that Iran wasn’t attacked because it has nuclear weapons. It was attacked because it doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and was therefore viewed by Israel and the U.S. as being a state that could be overcome militarily. But what really is, I think, most telling about this is the hypocrisy of the claims, because the only party in the region that has stockpiles of nuclear weapons (which are entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is the Israeli regime, not the Iranian. And the Israeli regime was joined in attacking Iran by another nuclear power—the United States.Craig MokhiberIsrael (which has attacked the United Nations throughout its entire life and declared that the United Nations is an anti-Semitic terror organization) fights like hell to stay in the United Nations, pays its dues every year to make sure that it stays in…and renews its treaty obligations as a member of the United Nations (that, of course, it violates with impunity). So it’s very funny that Israel calls the UN an anti-Semitic terror organization, yet it insists on being a member and paying its dues to fund that so-called anti-Semitic terror organization.Craig MokhiberI don’t think that putting Iran in an existential crisis is the best way to tell them you don’t need nuclear weapons. I think stopping attacking them, their economy, their currency, their scientists, their political leaders, their military personnel, their civilians, their girls’ schools—if you want a country to believe that it doesn’t need to arm itself, this is not the way to go about it.Craig MokhiberDavid Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, specialist in economics and tax issues, and a professor of practice teaching law, public policy, and journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including The Making of Donald Trump and It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What The Trump Administration Is Doing To America. He is also the co-founder of DCReport, a nonprofit news service that reports what the President and Congress DO, not what they SAY.Convicting Donald Trump of tax fraud would be very easy. You establish these corporations [reporting major losses] don’t exist. You establish that he took tax losses from these multiple corporations (in all, about 60 entries over the six years of tax returns). And there’s no defense for that. It’s flat-out fraud. It’s blatant fraud. So Trump has gotten away with this because we don’t seriously treat high-level tax fraud in this country.David Cay JohnstonNews 3/20/26* Our top story this week concerns a new study titled “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis.” As summarized in Hell Gate, this study demonstrates that the precipitous rise in rent prices are not primarily the result of insufficient housing supply or of vacancy rates. Moreover, contrary to the claims of the so-called Abundance movement, reducing regulations to spur new construction is unlikely to create significantly more housing. Even if it did, that would probably fail to bring down rents, because the real cause of the rental spike is “Steep national inequality.” So, what can be done to bring down rents? Maximilian Buchholz, the lead author of the study, puts it bluntly in this interview: “rent control, tenant protection policies like just cause eviction, and income supports for people toward the bottom.” Simply put, the best policies to lower rents are policies that lower rents. This has been demonstrated time and time again in different policy areas, yet on the whole, Democrats still seem to prefer byzantine policy formulae instead of straightforward policy solutions to the glaring issues facing the American people. * Speaking of rising costs, Washingtonian magazine is out with a new story on the Washington Post hiking prices for subscribers. Yet apparently not all subscribers are created equal. According to this story, these increases are accompanied by a simple yet insidious message: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” This is the latest deployment ...
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    2 時間 26 分
  • Spineless Democrats

    Spineless Democrats
    2026/03/14
    Ralph spends the whole hour with progressive activist, Corbin Trent, former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to discuss the lack of vision and the spineless leadership in the corporate Democratic Party.Corbin Trent is a co-founder of Brand New Congress and former co-director of Justice Democrats, two grassroots organizations working to elect progressive Democrats to Congress. He was the National Campaign Coordinator for the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign, and recently served as the Communications Director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He writes about rebuilding America at AmericasUndoing.com.This is a [Democratic] Party that is led by sinecurists and apparatchiks who never look at themselves in the mirror after they lose to the most vicious, cruel, ignorant, anti-worker, anti-women, anti-environment, anti-small taxpayer, pro-war Republican Party. They never look into it. It’s always: they blame the Greens or they blame some third party or Independent candidate. And they never ask themselves why as a national party did they abandon half the country, which are now called red states?Ralph NaderThe Democratic Party I think, ultimately, is leaderless because it’s visionless. It doesn’t really see. I don’t think the Democratic Party as an entity or as an ideology has a real vision for how to go forward differently. And, therefore, it’s hard to be led. It’s hard to lead if you don’t have a direction.Corbin TrentThe Democratic Party—like your Chuck Schumers, like your Hakeem Jeffries, and like most of the people that are elected there and in leadership positions at all, look at this system, the system of neoliberalism, and they think that somehow it’s going to magically start working again. And the fact is that it’s not. They have been unable so far to internalize the depth of the brokenness of this system. And then really unable to, I think, really internalize why Trump was powerful, why his messages were powerful. They want to look at it through this extremely narrow and negative lens of racism, bigotry and fear. As opposed to a complete and utter disdain for the system which is sucking from their lives and extracting from their communities. And I think that spells trouble.Corbin TrentIt’s not my job as a voter to inspire myself to vote for you. It’s your job as a candidate or as a party or as somebody to build a vision that inspires me to vote.Corbin TrentNews 3/13/26* This week, the New York City Council held a hearing on proposed legislation to carry out Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to repossess property from “landlords who have racked up housing code violations and debt from unpaid taxes and fines.” This bill would empower the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to turn these buildings over to owners they deem “more responsible.” This would be an update of a program the city has tried to implement before, called “third-party transfer.” However, the council is hesitant to take this step, worrying that it could disproportionately affect small landlords that simply lack the resources to fix code violations or pay fees, as opposed to venture capital backed corporate landlords. Rosa Kelly, chief of staff to the housing commissioner, said the department “views the program as a key part of [their] broader enforcement and preservation toolkit to ensure that housing remains safe and livable for New Yorkers.” This from Gothamist.* In more local news, this week Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released a long-awaited report on congestion traffic pricing in the District of Columbia. According to the Washington Examiner, the study was conducted in 2021 and the Mayor has delayed the release until now. Along with the release of the study, Mayor Bowser sent a letter to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, wherein the Mayor described the “congestion pricing tax scheme,” which includes a proposed $10 charge for people entering the city, as a “bad idea,” and argued that D.C. could not be compared to Midtown Manhattan, which recently implemented a successful congestion pricing system. Democratic Socialist Councilwoman and leading Mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis-George refused to dismiss the study out of hand, writing “Now that the report is public, the Council has an opportunity to dig into the findings & explore what they could mean for the District—including opportunities to reduce congestion, improve air quality & public health, & strengthen public transit for residents across the city.”* Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a new poll shows incumbent Mayor Karen Bass drawing under 20% of the vote in the upcoming primary for her reelection campaign. While this still puts Bass in the lead, it is clearly a weak showing and would be far below the 50% threshold she would need to win to avoid a November runoff. This poll also finds former reality television star Spencer Pratt in second place with around 10% support, ...
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    1 時間 19 分
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